Strategic Project Management A Competitive Edge

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Recently, a number of the world's major project management firms took major initiatives to illuminate government management about the strategic value and advantages of project management. The focus is always to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these firms maintain is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.

In this essay, Ed Naughton, Director General of the Institute of Project Management and recent IPMA Vice President, requires Professor Sebastian Green, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce and Professor of Management and Marketing at University College Cork (formerly of the London Business School), about his views of proper project management as a vehicle for competitive advantage.

Ed: What does one thing proper Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of the projects which are of crucial importance to enable the organisation in general to get competitive advantage.

Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?

Prof. Green: There are three features of having a core competence. The three qualities are: it gives value to customers; it's perhaps not easily imitated; it opens up new possibilities later on.

Ed: But just how can project administration generate a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: There are two factors to project management. If you believe any thing, you will likely require to study about read christopher brummer. One element is the actual collection of the sort of projects that the business partcipates in, and secondly there is execution, how a projects themselves are maintained.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of choosing the projects - it is not easy to determine which projects ought to be chosen!

Prof. Green: I think that the choice and prioritisation of projects is something that has not been done well within the project management literature because it's essentially been thought away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives you another way of prioritising projects since it is saying that some projects may not be as profitable as others, but if they add to our skill relative to others, then that is going to be important. Hit this web site next to study how to engage in it.

So, to take an example, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing new services more quickly than the others, drugs, let's say, finding product to market more quickly, then the projects that enable it to get the product more quickly to market are going to be the most important types, even if within their own terms, they do not have higher productivity than various projects. We learned about like us on facebook by searching Bing.

Ed: But if we are going to select our projects, we've to determine what are the variables or measurements we are going to select them against that give us the competitive edge.

Prof. Green: Positively. The company must know which actions it's engaged in, which are the important ones for it then and competitive advantage, that drives the choice of projects. Companies aren't very good at doing that and they might not even know what these activities are. They will believe that it is everything they do due to the power system.

Ed: If a company formulates its strategy, then what the project management group says is that project management could be the method for giving that strategy. Therefore, if the organisation is great at doing project management, are there any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, perhaps that returns to this issue of the difference between the sort of projects that are selected and the way you manage the projects. Demonstrably choosing the sort of projects depends upon having the ability to link and prioritise projects ac-cording to a knowledge of what the capacity of a business is relative to others.

Ed: Let us assume the technique is defined. To be able to deliver the strategy, it's to be broken-down, decomposed into a series of jobs. Thus, you have to be proficient at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Today, the literature says that for an operation to be great at doing projects it's to: devote project management procedures, train people on how best to apply/do project management and co-ordinate the efforts of the people qualified to work to procedures in and integrated way utilizing the notion of a project office. Does getting these three ways offer a competitive advantage because of this operation?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you manage tasks, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you may do things a lot better than the others. The 'better than' is through the ability and judgement and the information which can be accumulated over time of managing projects. There's an event curve effect here. Two firms will be at various points in the experience curve as to the knowledge they've built-up to handle these components of jobs where the rule book is limited. You-need knowledge and management sense because however good the rule book is, it will never deal fully using the complexity of life. You've to manage down the experience curve, you have to manage the knowledge and learning that you have of those three facets of project management because of it to become strategic.

Ed: Well, then, I think there is a gap there that's to be addressed as well, in that we have now produced a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we've not aimed that competency to the selection of projects which will help us to provide this competitive advantage. Clicking high quality asea company likely provides suggestions you could give to your brother. Is project management capable of being imitated?

Prof. Green: Not the softer features and not the develop-ment of tacit understanding of having run many, many projects over-time. So, for example, you, Ed, have more understanding of how-to run projects than others. That's why people came to you, because while you both may have a regular book like the PMBoK or the ICB, you've produced more experiential knowledge around it.

In essence, it could be copied a quantity of the way in which, however not once you arrange the softer tacit understanding of experience into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity styles are a hot topic at this time and are closely linked to the 'knowledge curve' effect you mentioned earlier in the day - how should we view them?

Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by figures, moving beyond the idea that that is all you need to do and you may enforce this pair of methods and capabilities and text book methods and a business is wholly plastic. In ways, exactly the same problem was experienced by the builders of the ability curve. If you show the knowledge curve to organizations o-n cost, it's nearly as though, for every doubling of volume, cost savings occur without you having to do something. What we all know is however, that the experience curve is a potential of the risk. Their' realisation is dependent upon the skill of managers.

Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives within the mindset to understand the potential advantages of project management?

Prof. Green: Until lately, project management has promoted it-self in technical terms. Then it would be more attractive to senior managers, if it was offered in terms of the integration at basic management, at the capability to manage over the functions lending approach processes with thinking. So, it's about the experience that makes project management so powerful, the techniques with the judgement and the mixing of the difficult and the smooth. If senior managers don't grasp it right now, it's perhaps not since they're wrong. It's because project management has not sold it self as effectively as it should've done.

Ed: Do we have to sell to chief executives and senior executives that it will provide competitive advantage to them?

Prof. Green: No, I do believe we must show them how it does it. We have to go inside and actually show them how they are able to use it, not only in terms of delivering projects on time and within cost. We have to show them how they can use it to overcome resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and activities that lead to competitive edge, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the company. There is a complete array of ways that they can put it to use. They have to see that the proof-of the outcome is preferable to just how they are currently doing it..